At one of the Greenbuild session I attended last week, Andy Florance, CEO of CoStar, said the biggest lie in the construction world used to be “my building is under construction.” Now, he said, “that lie has been replaced by my building is LEED certified.”

What is the gold-green standard? Image courtesy Kristopher Lee

That got me thinking about what the highest standard of green building is. Is is LEED platinum? Is it a living building? What about a building that is netzero energy? So I’ve posed the question to you in a new poll at right, and would love to hear what goal you think all buildings should be striving for, if they should be striving for any green goal at all. Or comment below and tell me what standard you think is the best.

But I digress, back to the topic line: do green buildings sell better than their counterparts? According to CoStar, that answer is yes. 

CoStar did a study of the buildings in its entire U.S. database between the first quarter of 2006 and the first quarter of 2008, and based on that information, LEED buildings were 4 percent more occupied than their competitors, renting at $11.33 more per square foot and selling at $171 more per square foot, a 64 percent advantage. Both the occupancy rates and rental amounts climbed - from 4 to 6 percent and from an $11.33 to $18.58 advantage - if you count the past two quarters of this year.

But, Florance cautioned, that information is going to be really tough, if impossible, to measure in the future, thanks to the current state of the economy.

If you want more factual information, read my article in the DJC here that has loads more information on the topic. Or you can see a version of this study dated March here.

After a tumultuous year, the zHome project has started off on a new foot with its Monday groundbreaking. The project is a 10-unit townhome development in the Issaquah Highlands that uses smart design and technology to create all the energy it consumes. It plans have net zero carbon emissions and cut water use by 60 percent.

I first wrote about the project last December here when Noland Homes was the

Courtesy of David Vandervort Architects

builder on the project and planned to develop it at its own cost. A lot has changed since then: namely Noland dropped out and Howland Homes came on (and will develop it at its own cost). But the project has finally broken ground and, as Brad Liljequist, zHome project manager for the city of Issaquah, says in the project’s inaugual blog post (yes it has a blog here) it “takes my breath away a little bit” to be at this stage in the project’s life.

zHome has a nifty Web site that can answer all and any of your questions from what materials are being used to how they’re doing it to how to buy into it. For more information, visit it here.

Courtesy of David Vandervort Architects

This solar panel from the groundbreaking comes wrapped in a bow!

The latest rendering

Being a reporter, I’m always struck by how magazines or newspapers choose to put words like “green” in quotations. The designation implies a term is not yet known to the general public and says a lot about a publication’s readership.

Here at the DJC we put quotations around phrases like ”netzero” (a goal of producing all the energy a building uses) or “regeneration” (making a site better than what was originally there), but not LEED or green. Then again, we have a focused readership.

So, while reading Vanity Fair’s third annual green issue last weekend, I was struck by the magazine’s presentation of green buildings, and by its use of quotations around words like LEED “gold,” “living roof,” and “cradle to cradle.”

The coverage raised a question in my mind: when one of the foremost investigative magazines in the country covers green buildings but still assumes its readership doesn’t know much about them,  just how mainstream can green building be?

What do you think, is green building mainstream? 

Three pieces between the magazine’s covers, all written by VF Special Correspondent Matt Tyrnauer, take on the subject. To read an interview with Tyrnauer about the projects, click here. 

The first is a photo and long caption of New York-based Neil M. Denari Architects’ Manhattan condo project called HL23, pictured above left. Denari is designing a 14-floor cantilevered building on a 40-foot-wide lot that gets wider as it gets taller. Vanity Fair uses quotation marks to say it is reaching LEED “gold.”

(more…)